Marketoonist: "Safe is Risky" cartoon

Weekly hand-drawn business cartoon from Marketoonist Tom Fishburne

Author

Tom Fishburne
August 19, 2024

Welcome back to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

A quick note before this week’s cartoon — I’m migrating to a different email platform. In case this newsletter shows up in your promotions tab in Gmail, please move it to your primary tab to help train Google that it’s not a promotion. Thanks for all your support!

Playing it Safe is Risky

I’ve always liked this insight from Seth Godin:

“If failure is not an option, then neither is success.”

Organizations can spot the risks of a new idea a mile away. But there’s a curious blind spot when it comes to the risks of not taking those risks.

The path of least resistance is to play it safe and keep as close to the tried-and-true as possible.

I stumbled across an interesting HBR article from Bill Taylor called “Playing It Safe Is Riskier Than You Think”. In it, he writes about an analogy of risk first framed by two business professors 35 years ago.

“Executives and entrepreneurs face two very different sorts of risks. One is that their organization will make a bold move that failed — a risk they call ‘sinking the ship.’ The other is that their organization will fail to make a bold move that would have succeeded — a risk they call ‘missing the boat.’

“Naturally, most executives worry more about sinking the boat than missing the boat, which is why so many organizations, even in flush times, are so cautious and conservative. To me, though, the opportunity for executives and entrepreneurs is to recognize the power of rocking the boat — searching for big ideas and small wrinkles, inside and outside the organization, that help you make waves and change course.”

When we’re leading a project, particularly at a large company, I think that’s a big part of our job — to continually find ways to rock the boat.

The most remarkable ideas go against the flow. But we don’t want to sacrifice the remarkable parts of the idea for the comfort of a smoother ride.

We can’t always change the inherent risk aversion of an organization. But we can rock the boat.

Keynote speaking

As we drop off our youngest at college this week, I’m planning to focus much more of my time on keynote speaking. Please let me know if you’d ever like to talk about bringing levity to any events you’re planning. Or please recommend me to friends or colleagues.

Here are a few upcoming speaking events. Hope to see some of you on the road!

Cartoon from the archives

Here’s a related one from 2011.

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.